


MEMENTO MORI: ADDENDUM

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-04
Updated: 2011-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:01:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Companion piece to Memento Mori. Fenris and Anders don't know much about presents. <i>The more unexpected the gift, the more honest the reaction—and though Hawke did not say as much, Fenris could assume it was that surprise which rewarded him, better than all the unpolished coin and tatted purses he received for his meddling throughout the City of Chains. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	MEMENTO MORI: ADDENDUM

**Author's Note:**

  * For [autumnyte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/autumnyte/gifts).
  * Inspired by [MEMENTO MORI](https://archiveofourown.org/works/221317) by [spicyshimmy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy). 



> This was written for Autumnyte's birthday. Inspiration drawn from [this art](http://naiadestricolor.tumblr.com/post/7682076415/so-i-kinda-realized-that-for-all-the-sketches-i) by Naiadestricolor on tumblr.

It was Feastday, and there were gifts.

Hawke was accustomed to the practice; he did not always wait for the proper moment, nor did he always require a general excuse. The more unexpected the gift, the more honest the reaction—and though Hawke did not say as much, Fenris could assume it was that surprise which rewarded him, better than all the unpolished coin and tatted purses he received for his meddling throughout the City of Chains.

For Isabela, there was a hat she insisted Fenris was to wear next, though he declined each offer, as feathers did not suit; for Aveline, a copper carving, myrtle to match her marigolds, that pleased and displeased her at once; for Varric, a collection of tales gathered and transcribed by a rival purveyor of official lies, and the night of deploring his prose to follow; for Merrill, knitting needles to undo the tangles in her ball of twine; for Karl, Orlesian volumes, which Varric deemed ‘the naughtiest.’

The winks that followed disturbed no single gray hair on Karl’s head, nor even the Anderfels complexion that, he often complained, was as much of a curse as it was a blessing.

For Fenris there were new curtains, though Hawke sighed that he was still missing new windows. And there was a gift for Anders, as well, something found in a sewer, of which Hawke was predictably proud. He believed in treasures polished from the rough; so long as it was clean, Fenris would have no reason to protest its appearance in their lives, save that he had every reason.

The amulet was from Tevinter, and Anders had difficulty keeping his eyes off it—the same difficulty he had in actually taking it, with his own two hands.

‘It looks just like a cat, doesn’t it?’ Hawke asked, turning it this way and that, though the deep-scored carving in the old wood caught no light, reflecting no polish. ‘Or perhaps—here we go, is it upside-down?—a _mushroom_.’

‘ _I’ll_ tell you what it _really_ looks like,’ Isabela said, to which Varric replied she saw the same image in everything. ‘Well, then. It _must_ be true.’

Fenris had no gift for anyone; no gift was preferable to the wrong one, such as a hat whose owner required someone else to wear it, or a picture-book that made a grown mage sweat, or two sharp needles given to the aegis of a known blood mage, currently practicing.

Hawke was pleased with himself, and the amulet was dangerous—perhaps the most dangerous of all his clever presents, and perhaps the reason why he was so pleased.

‘Still, Hawke,’ Isabela said, ‘one doesn’t go about giving _other_ people’s you-know-what’s jewelry. Can’t you see how that might make Fenris feel…threatened?’

‘There is a threat,’ Fenris replied. ‘Should he wear that…thing, it will call the wrong attention.’

But Anders’s expression was a different beast, all the light that the amulet did not reflect caught in his eyes. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve had a gift,’ he said, and tucked it beneath his belt, a fine place to hide anything.

*

It was no longer Feastday, but there were curtains.

Hawke’s comment about the windows did not rankle, for they were nothing more than the truth Fenris greeted each day: cracked glass and the occasional hole, some entire panes darkly empty.

‘Do _you_ like them?’ Fenris asked, observing the color. They were yellow, with heavy tassels, the sort of fabric Anders touched first before saying anything. Brocade ran thick along the edges, and they were a display Karl would deem _troublesomely expensive_.

‘You go on one little trip into the Deep Roads,’ Varric enjoyed saying, to any who would yet listen, ‘and, no matter how down-and-dirty you are, it _changes_ you. You start buying furniture you’ve never even heard of before—all the way from Orlais.’

‘Are they Orlesian?’ Anders asked. ‘They _look_ Orlesian.’

‘They look…yellow,’ Fenris replied.

‘They _are_ yellow,’ Anders said. ‘Or would you call them gold? Honey, perhaps? Dwarven sovereigns?’

‘You are not answering my question.’ Fenris folded his arms, taloned fingers tracing the sensitive skin at the crook of his elbow. He would repeat himself. ‘Do you like them, Anders?’

‘They’re very soft,’ Anders said. The corners of his mouth turned up like the points in an apple tartlet, warm and familiar.

It was as good an answer as Fenris could expect to receive, and so he knew to accept it.

Anders did like soft things, from the bedraggled kittens that wound around his boots in the alienage to the bandages from Karl’s clinic he wore wrapped around his forearms, over the little tears in the seams of his coat. It was a preference Fenris had noted, even if he did not yet understand the reasoning behind it—why he would not sew a thing if it needed mending, or ignore it if it did not.

But perhaps it was enough to understand that the feelings existed, without attempting to grasp their directions. The philosophy had carried him thus far, and he was not altogether unhappy.

‘They’ll keep out the sun,’ Anders said, turning toward Fenris at last. ‘And that would be nice, in the mornings.’

It was still a surprise to see him this way, eyes bright when once they had been host and prey to many shadows. The lines in his face yet lingered, but they were no longer quite so deep. Fenris had noted each small difference, grateful for them all in his own way—just as he had been grateful the day Anders stood perfectly still for him on one narrow path cut through the peaks of Sundermount, allowing Fenris to pull his hair back and out of his eyes.

A slave needed every advantage he could gather to pass unseen through his master’s halls, but a free man required no such invisibility. Obscuring one’s vision—thinking one could not be seen if one could not see—was foolishness itself. Yet Fenris had chosen to explain that he had no desire to catch a fireball up his backside simply because their accompanying mage could not see past the fall of his own hair, and Isabela’s lips pursed in that knowing way.

Anders had taken to the style after that, fingers lingering against his own hair every morning, and Fenris did not presume to think he was remembering the feel of Fenris’s touch, even when he closed his eyes.

‘And they shall be ruined the first day it rains,’ Fenris said, a fact even Hawke had not foreseen. The lavish fabric was of the same sort that Hawke himself preferred in his Hightown estate; it would not withstand the elements, because it had not been designed for any purpose other than existing, luxurious, within the safety of a rich man’s home.

Fenris’s house had once been a grand manor, but it was home to no rich men. There were only two fugitives from Tevinter within, a patterned cloth patching the hole in the master bedroom’s ceiling, and a shrinking garden of mushrooms in the entry hall downstairs. These _curtains_ represented a meddlesome man’s effort to make the house into something it was not.

Perhaps Hawke had understood what Fenris could not maintain: that curtains would lead to windows, and from there, anything was possible.

‘We could always keep them up for the dry season.’ Anders wound his fingers around the silky tassels at the hem; they were soft enough to tickle. ‘Or… Karl’s always complaining that his bad hip acts up right before it’s about to rain. I’ll ask him every day I’m at the clinic, and that way we won’t be taken by surprise.’

Fenris perched on the end of his bed, covers as rumpled as he’d left them. From there, he could see both Anders and the curtains clearly, the shaft of morning light that normally woke them both conveniently blocked behind the thick fabric and the heavy brocade.

‘I shall have to thank Hawke,’ Fenris said—one of his efforts to realize things aloud, rather than alone.

‘I’ll show you how to write the note,’ Anders replied, another smile passing like a secret across his face.

*

During the daylight hours, there was little time for practice or for study. They read instead by candle-light when the shadows were longest, when the rooms were nothing _but_ shadows, and dark words stood out on stained vellum pages. Anders never spilled their ink, and Fenris leaned beside him, writing one by each, though the comparison in their speed and penmanship may well have been laughable.

Nonetheless, Fenris enjoyed the safety and the completion of a sentence, though it was an arduous process from beginning to final punctuation.

‘I don’t know what to write,’ Anders admitted, watching him struggle.

‘And I…do not know how to write it,’ Fenris agreed.

Isabela would have called that _something_ , and Varric also—his metaphor would be less salty, more to do with words and their assembly than bodies and theirs, while Isabela’s would include no more than a gesture and a wink, to change odd meaning without warning.

They were not here. Only Anders was, and their mushrooms, and the cool breeze from the window, not stiff enough to sway the curtains. It crept in beneath the tassels all the same, and those shifted.

Fenris finished his current letters, then set down his quill. His hand lingered in the air before it accepted its place on Anders’s shoulder, while the scrape of quill-tip on old paper punctuated nothing but silence and gentle breathing.

‘If you are cold, it would be better to remain fully clothed,’ Fenris said.

Anders smiled again, his wide brow furrowing, one deep wrinkle above the bridge of his long nose. ‘I’m warmer already.’

He set Hawke’s gift upon the table, such a small thing, for which he was no less grateful. _Jewelry for another man’s you-know-what,_ Fenris thought, and wished his companions were not comprised of so many rogues, sneaking in uninvited and making themselves comfortable, putting their feet up, still wearing their muddy boots, whether or not he was home to greet them—whether or not they were even truly visiting.

Hawke’s gestures were obvious, even for him. _You have no windows, Fenris_ , he might as well have said, and, _Nor did you think of presents._

‘This…amulet,’ Fenris said. ‘You like it, too?’

‘Do you want it?’ Anders asked.

Fenris tutted. ‘I do _not_ ,’ he replied.

Anders’s fingers, worn from his work with Karl in the clinic, and stained on one thumb with the ink he was so careful not to spill, touched the corner. ‘It doesn’t really look like mushrooms, though.’

Fenris agreed, though that was only one of many reasons why he kissed him.

They had duties to attend, social ones, encouraged by curtains, the letters of gratitude one wrote to appreciate not a gift but whoever had gifted it. Such was the custom, as far as Fenris understood—which he knew was not all that often, especially when it came to holidays. Still, Hawke had his own difficulties surrounding the practice, those insults all presents insinuated: _I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t have something you might have wanted already, something I could afford so much more easily._

Anders’s mouth was smiling again when they finished.

‘I didn’t get you something,’ he added, resting his brow to Fenris’s, his nose once more getting in the way of everything.

‘That is a relief,’ Fenris said. ‘For then we would have had too many curtains.’

*

During the long hours of the night, even Hawke’s curtains could not blot out the moonlight, filtered in pale shafts through the weariest patches of the sheet above. _Just like camping beneath the stars,_ Isabela had said when she saw it, then slapped a bug against her throat, and Fenris knew it was not a compliment.

Anders was equally pale in that moonlight, his hair undone, pushing it back behind his ear until Fenris obliged, with the same gesture, for him.

No matter how cold the air, Anders always grew hot when he slept. Fenris woke to find the blankets pushed from his body, slung low around his waist like a Tevinter serving girl’s robes. But it wasn’t that which caught Fenris’s attention, nor was his interest charmed by what lay hidden beneath the sheets. It was the silvery darts of skin crisscrossing Anders’s back—an intricate network of scars, some thick and some raised, and some as delicate as the flicker of a minnow’s scales beneath fast, clear water.

To the untrained eye, they might well have been a map. Sharp, geometric lines outlined the borders of foreign countries; hidden against Anders’s shoulder-blade was an undiscovered continent, and against his lower back, where his ribs ended, was a cluster of island nations, the scars round instead of long and sharp.

Fenris put his fingers to them, same as a quill’s keen edge to paper. Without his gauntlets, there was only the callused press of skin to tight, numbed scar-flesh, and Fenris traced one to the other with the same patience as Anders showed his patients, as though he thought he might find memory itself in the design.

They were _not_ his tattoos—they had not been inflicted with the same artist’s care, nor the same artist’s vision, and lacked the cohesion Fenris expected—but Anders had touched what Fenris hated most with reverence, once, and so changed its meaning.

What Anders gave, and what Fenris gave back—that, too, was a form of gifting, though it had no flourish and no bow, no broad brim or velvet binding.

‘They wouldn’t let me heal myself after,’ Anders murmured into his pillow, soft as the hiss of dying embers in the hearth. ‘Because the lessons wouldn’t stick, if the hurt was too pretty.’

Fenris curled his bare fingers in the small of Anders’s back, knuckles brushing the interlocking vertebrae of his spine. It still galled him how quickly his anger rose at certain reminders, those of their shared abuses, even if the memories were not his own.

There was no reason to think in those terms—of Hadriana _or_ Danarius, either instead of both, or of who was more cruel, or of whom it might have been better to serve.

‘They don’t hurt,’ Anders added, after listening to nothing more entertaining than Fenris breathing into the silence, itself no pleasant reply. He drew closer to Fenris on their narrow bed, warm lips against the lyrium-lined hollow of his throat. ‘But I _can_ feel your fingers between them—and I used to think it was all numb back there. That I’d never feel anything again.’

Some enjoyed the hurt, or what came after. Some enjoyed pleasure in the absence of pain. Some had neither the luxury nor the impulse to feel either, and though it allowed skin time to heal, the body itself was different from what comprised its movements, its impulses, its uncertainties. The flesh was not all there was to consider, though the flesh was warm beneath Fenris’s palms.

Fenris did not say that it was all right, for it was not all right; he did not say that it was beautiful, for it would cheapen the ugliness. He did not lie, and so he did not say anything at all, but that did not matter as much as his hands, fingertips pressed into the soft places scar tissue did not mark and mar. Anders crawled forward, balanced on his knees, and pushed Fenris’s hair behind his ears, where it did not stay.

*

It was the second day after Feastday, and there was a letter on the pillow.

It had no seal; it was not from Hawke, nor from Varric, and Isabela preferred her missives to come with her body, words spoken rather than contained, or compromised. Karl called a man to him without leaving note, and it was not Donnic, for it was not cards-day.

Fenris unfolded the stiff paper crease by crease. He recognized the writing, fingers steadied when they had something to hold—whether it was a quill pen or an inkwell or someone else’s hand.

 _Thank you for the gift_ , the letter read, though Fenris had spent no time in the shops with a purse of clattering coin, nor had he celebrated beyond what was customary.

‘Enjoy your Feastday?’ Hawke asked outside, shielding his eyes from the Hightown sun. Though the distance from such heights was not remarkable, the air was cleaner, the smog clearer, less to choke on, if not more to see. ‘The curtains were for the neighbors, by the way—just so they’d have to do less complaining.’

‘You are a generous man, Hawke,’ Fenris replied, though in truth, he felt the same.

 **END**


End file.
